Sunday 14 March 2004 10.04 EST
First published on Sunday 14 March 2004 10.04 EST

It seems unfair to put Ruth Kelly under the microscope after the week she has endured - unless, of course, you are one of the 750,000 Equitable Life policyholders, who lost £3 billion between them.

It fell to Kelly, as Financial Secretary, to present Lord Penrose's findings into the breakdown of Equitable while ensuring that as little muck as possible stuck to the Government. Many feel she was pushed into the firing line by her boss, Gordon Brown, but that would be to misread Kelly, even to patronise her.

She is young (35), enthusiastic, bright and has been described as 'right-thinking' in no less an organ than the Times. She is a working woman, a mother of four and, some say, a bit of a babe in an intellectual sort of way.

Kelly is no victim, though, and she does not need special handling. From her roots to the roost she now rules within the Treasury - she is tipped by many as the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer - her profile is more solidly establishment than that of which many Tories can boast.

She was a Northern Irish Catholic whose family moved south of the border and then to England. The Irish press trumpeted her as one of its own when she won her promotion to the Treasury (she was Economic Secretary when she commissioned the Penrose inquiry). But she sounds about as Irish as most of Jack Charlton's famous football team did - which is to say, not very - and she grew up comfortably because her father had a pharmacy business.

When her family moved to the UK she attended a chain of public schools including Millfield, and finished up at Westminster - being one of the first girls to join its sixth form.

She won a place at Oxford to read medicine but switched, during her first year at Queen's College, to study politics, philosophy and economics. She didn't involve herself in many student activities at Oxford, and least of all hacky politics or student journalism, but she was on the same circuit as Ed Balls (now Gordon Brown's right-hand man and an MP in waiting). She went on to the LSE to take an MSc. This is one very, very bright woman.

Kelly joined the Guardian's economics desk, then run by Will Hutton, subsequently editor of The Observer and now at the Work Foundation. Politically speaking it was a good move: Hutton was about to achieve recognition with The State We're In and was linked closely to the reformers within the Labour party.

It was Kelly, as an economics researcher working on the Guardian's Budget coverage, who spotted that Chancellor Norman Lamont had broken the Treasury's 'golden rule' in his 1992 pre-election Budget: borrowing to fund non-capital expenditure. It was a scoop and established her reputation, which was cemented when she worked out how much taxpayers' money had been lost on Black Wednesday. 'She was very good at going through the numbers, she has a good analytical brain,' says a colleague. She joined the Labour Party, not a prerequisite despite the Guardian's image.

From the Guardian, where she was well-liked, she moved to the Bank of England as deputy editor of the quarterly Inflation Report. She has said that she did this knowing it would enhance her CV and give her a taste of the policy-making she was so eager to engage in.

Meanwhile she had begun some grass-roots political campaigning, joining an anti-racism group working in Tower Hamlets. She met Derek Gadd and they married in 1996. By 1997 she had been selected to fight Bolton West, a Tory seat that was one of the marginals only a landslide victory could win for Labour.

Kelly, pregnant at the time, campaigned hard. She is honest enough to acknowledge that in many ways her pregnancy was a blessing on the doorstep but that should not detract from the sheer effort this must have demanded of her. It is testimony to her stamina and drive that she emerged victorious with an 11 per cent swing.

She believes that her family remains a useful link with her constituents who are able to talk to her as a real person about ordinary life.

Her rise has been meteoric by most standards yet there are jobs she would not consider because they conflict with her religious beliefs, such as the Department for International Development which would entail promoting contraception in developing countries. Kelly is a devout Catholic who considers her faith a private matter but who upholds the values in her public life, witness her opposition to Commons' motions on embryo research. Whether you agree or not with her views she is not a hypocrite and deserves respect for that.

Her ascent has been helped not hindered by an early brush with Brown: the Treasury Select Committee snapped Kelly up after the 1997 General Election. She politely but effectively grilled the Chancellor at her first opportunity.

Of course she has made mistakes. The Evening Standard in particular has taken her to task for accusing the Tories of failing to cut stamp duty on shares when, in fact, they did cut it. The Equitable episode was not exactly a mistake but she has been found wanting by friends and foes alike: even those friendly to her observe that her speech to the House was 'cold' and 'clinical'.

It was all too clear that she had spent the weeks since Christmas working out how to get the Government off the compensation hook and that meant glossing over Penrose's criticisms of the regulators who fell under her umbrella. She is understood to be relieved that the report is public and satisfied that it was as wide-ranging as it needed to be. Whatever the reaction, she has done her political career no harm. She stayed on message and proved herself loyal. Her track record suggests she plays a long game.

It must be galling to be known as much for who you are as what you are doing - or not doing. Kelly may be young, female and juggling a family with work (she has a nanny and a supportive husband who changed his job so that she could pursue hers) but she would be the first to want equal treatment. When she drew up policy for parental leave she placed as much emphasis on persuading fathers to take time out of the workplace as she did on giving mothers more flexibility.

The disappointing element is that, as a journalist, she would have been in a position to attack what she now has to defend. Can she really believe the spin she has put on the Equitable report? She certainly sounds convinced.

If Kelly is the fall girl it is a price she seems willing to pay. You see this pragmatism elsewhere: at a constituency meeting when she learned that the Government's policy was leading to cuts in local social services provision she maintained that the overall policy was right. This is the unpalatable side of politics.

Kelly is enjoying herself in Parliament but she refuses to predict the future. So we must do it for her. It is possible to imagine a meeting between Kelly and, say, Yvette Cooper (now regeneration minister in John Prescott's office) at whatever the 2020 equivalent of Granita will be. The party has lost its way, having steered too close to the Tories, and lost middle class support as well as its traditional following. A clique of modernisers sets about making the party re-electable. They look different, fresh, new. Here we go back to the future, and on current form, Kelly will be part of it.

Profile

Name: Ruth Kelly Born: 9 May, 1968 Job title: Financial Secretary to the Treasury Family: Married to Derek Gadd; children, six, five and three years and nine months Education: Finished her A-Levels at Westminster School. Oxford University (Queen's College) reading philosophy, politics and economics. MSc at London School of Economics Career: 1990-94, economics researcher and writer at the Guardian; 1994-97, Bank of England, deputy editor of the Inflation Report; 1997, MP for Bolton West; 1997-98, member of Treasury select committee; 1998-2000, PPS to Nick Brown MP; 2000-2002, Economic Secretary to the Treasury Interests: Walking and family Strange claim to fame: Holds record for giving birth to the highest number of children while an MP